Table of contents

1. Introduction - how do we cite?

This tutorial is not about citation but a word on it is
nevertheless required. Historians follow many different styles
but it is generally ‘footnote’ or ‘endnote’ based. In either case
the citations take the following forms:

A bibliography that lists works or sources consulted
in the course of preparation of a piece of research

A means of indicating when, in a specific portion of text,
argument depends upon a particular work, be it primary or
secondary (i.e. footnotes or endnotes)

There is an enormous amount of possible variety in the character
of these two elements but, at least in modern scholarship, they
will always both be present.

The purpose of these notes is to act as an apparatus to point the
reader to further or explanatory information regarding a
statement, quotation or argument in the text and as a means to
cite the source of that information.

Building these citations into a piece of research can be time
consuming and annoying but are vitally important to the
scholarship of your work. As such various tools have been
developed aimed at automating part of the process and as a means
to organising and structuring files in a way that can be
considered ‘standardised’.

Reference managers or citation managers are software packages
designed to easily save bibliographic references (including
primary sources) into a searchable database and generate them as
required into formatted footnotes/endnotes and bibliographies.
Among other functions, they can normally import references from
online catalogues, and integrate with word processors (such as
Microsoft Word or Open Office) to facilitate the insertion of
footnotes as you write.

1.1 The Benefits

A reference manager will save you a great deal of time organising
your sources.

It’s easy to save references from online sources. Often you
can do this with a single click.

It makes it far easier to organise your references, and keep
track of what you’ve already read.

It separates data from presentation. So it
does all the hard work of converting references into different
publication styles (eg, when rewriting part of your dissertation
for an article). and it ensures that references in your work are
consistently presented.

Moreover, reference managers offer some or all of a range of
further functions that can turn them into powerful tools for
managing the entire research life-cycle, from collecting sources
to data analysis to publishing and sharing, including:

Annotations and attachments: you can take notes or even full
transcriptions in the software itself, and attach (or link to)
copies of the original text if it’s available in electronic form.

Organisation and linking: categories, tags or other means of
organising references.

Cloud features, enabling online backup/storage and syncing
across different devices.

Collaboration facilities for working on projects with other
researchers.

Bulk import and export in standard formats.

Zotero

1.2 The drawbacks

Not everyone is convinced that citation managers are the best
option. There are still plenty of historians who type in each
footnote/endnote manually and create their bibliographies in a
similar manner. There are no rights or wrongs on this and so it
is usually best to give citation managers a try and decide what
works best for you.

Some of the downsides of using citation managers are:

To add entries tend to slow down the writing process. If you
are mid-flow with an argument you may not wish to spend time
adding a reference in this manner. A quick ‘stand-in’ footnote
might suffice.

Connectivity with Text editors such as Microsoft Word has
improved greatly over the years but this varies depending on the
tool you decide to use.

Each tool will come with a set of standard ‘styles’, however
these do not always conform to the style that you wish to use (or
are obliged to use). It is generally possible to create your own
bespoke style for each tool but it varies to how easy this is to
achieve. Most historians find that they have to check through
their citations to make minor changes (admittedly this is little
different to what you have to do if you type the citations in
manually).

Some tools cost money plus there is no guarantee that the
company who produces the tool will continue to exist or develop
the tool. At the very least the tool will be updated
incrementally and may change functionality at a moments notice.

2. Citation Tools

There are various citation tools on the market each with their
own strengths and weaknesses. Probably the leaders for historians
at the moment are EndNote and Zotero, although some do prefer
others such as Mendeley, Papers, and RefWorks. Apple users can
also choose Bibdesk. Links to these tools can be found in the
further reading list at the end of this book.

In this section we look at just two of these tools – EndNote and
Zotero.

2.1 Endnote

This is the market leader, and the most widely used and
recognised citation and research software. It costs around
several hundred pounds on a commercial basis and about a little
under £100 with an educational discount. Is it worth it?

Some say yes, others no. EndNote has some important strengths. It
has got good online searching capabilities which help you to find
sources and link to them. It integrates seamlessly with Microsoft
Word, and it is also widely known and therefore unlikely to just
disappear. EndNote is software based so it is not reliant on web
browsers, which acts as both a strength and a weakness. It will
work equally well online and offline.

The downside of EndNote is its inability to cite websites very
well (which is increasingly becoming important in some fields of
historical enquiry). It is also not very good at creating split
bibliographies (by which is meant breaking down a bibliography by
primary source, journals, monographs etc.).

2.2 Zotero

This tool has been developed by historians, for historians and is
fast rivalling EndNote as the tool of choice. It has the benefit
of being free unlike EndNote. Its benefits include excellent
handling of bibliographies (especially on the Web) and the
ability to save web pages as a snapshot, to add notes, and tags.

Limitations include having less citation styles than EndNote
(although that is slowly changing) and

Zotero is generally a plug-in for Web Browsers and text editors
but you can download a copy onto your desktop as well if you
prefer. Either way there is an offline component to Zotero so
although it works best online, it can be used offline as well.

Initially Zotero was a plugin for Firefox only, but that is no
longer a limitation.